And the Guild officers were dead. If the two had imagined that they had actually installed any proper precautions in the room below them, if they had had confidence in the man’chi of someone within the house, in the Atageini staff or otherwise to aid and abet their movements— Clearly someone had prevented those particular precautions from moving into position in the room below. His staff seemed extraordinarily well-briefed on what had happened, even smug, if he could read Jago’s tone.
And he knew their ways. He knew that Banichi had no inclination to be the second man into an action he could much better direct, or to take a purely defensive position when someone aimed at their lives. Neither was Cenedi so inclined, nor was the dowager he served—Tatiseigi might have hesitated, even Tabini might have paused to consider. But the only likely argument between Cenedi and Banichi after two years of running operations together would have been which of them moved first.
The Guild officers, the biggest threat to come at them directly from Murini’s side, hadn’t even made it to supper.
And what did Banichi do next? Now what did one possibly do, when one had blown up one’s own officers, and was running buses full of farmers into the capital?
At the moment he felt inclined to sink down into the nearest seat and let his stomach settle, but his own seat was a few rows back, and the nearest was occupied, like most of the seats, by an ordinary provincial, a man in a rough canvas jacket, with a hunting rifle in callused hands. The type was everywhere. In all those buses. Tabini was in the airplane, and Banichi and Cenedi were calling the shots, never mind Tabini’s personal bodyguard.
He was suddenly overwhelmed by the scale of it. By the force of what they had launched.
“You should sit down, Bren-ji,” Jago said.
“This is a war we bring, Jago-ji.” Atevi society had known no open warfare since the War of the Landing—skirmishes, yes; civil unrest, yes; sniping between bodyguards of lords in conflict, constantly—but not a conflict that swept up every clan on the continent, flagrantly involving bystanders. Not involving middle-aged men with hunting rifles.
And assassinating Guild officers, the Guild being supposedly the keepers of the law and the peace, the impartial, every-sided court of appealc impartiality and fairness had clearly gone by the board; so had legally mandated support for the sitting aiji. But his staff had delivered an answer for it.
“Bren-ji?”
“Do we hope simply to drive all the way into Shejidan, Jago-ji?”
“Perhaps.” Far too lightly.
“Or are we going to the train station?”
“We refuel there, nandi, at the station pump.”
“And the Guild? Are they moving against us?”
“We have moved to convince certain forces within the Guild, persons of certain man’chi, nandi—that Gegini was no fit leader.”
Not from the grave, he wasn’t, that was quite clear.
Cenedi and Banichi. Extravagant action, high and wide action, of a sort subordinates didn’t undertake on their own.
It was not just to protect him, he thought. It was much beyond that. Banichi and Jago had been Tabini’s staffers before they were his. In the nature of things, there always was one higher man’chi that overrode what they owed to him.
So had Tabini appropriated them? Given them such an order? Or had the dowager herself?
And coordinated it, dammit all. The echoes of that explosion had hardly died before Tabini was airborne, headed into trouble ahead of them, precipitating this flood of buses and trucks.
Follow, Tabini was saying to all who had ever followed him—irresistible as the mecheiti leader, dashing hellbent for whatever destination, in the echoes of that explosion. Atevi of the Ragi man’chi were feeling more than an emotional tug at their hearts. Their whole being plunged toward that leader, pell mell, an attraction not in his wiring. He might be immune for the hour, capable of a second, critical thought—deciding things on love, that slower, more anguished emotion. But his staff wasn’t wired that way. It was the aiji who’d called, and they’d moved. Ruthlessly, comprehensively, without consulting himc dammit.
“The aiji ordered you,” he said to Jago. “Did he? He didn’t rely on his own security.”
Jago’s hand closed on his wrist. “We may die in this effort, Bren-ji. And our Guild resists emotional decisions. But this time, yes, we are obliged to go.”
“The paidhi is likewise obliged,” he said, closing his hand atop hers, a contact atevi ordinarily did not invite or accept. “We humans have our own feelings. We understand.” He did. Tabini had called in a debt, drafted his staff, the dowager’s, his own. They could get killed. But if it was the time to do it, if his staff was going, then he damned sure was. “Are the Atageini going into this on the same grounds? Are they solidly with us?”
“They must,” Jago said, and it made sense. Tatiseigi’s historic premises now had suffered at least two rooms in utter wreckage, the upstairs premises and the room immediately below, not to mention the lily foyer, the stables, and the driveway hedge.
Ridiculous items on the surface—but a matter of Atageini sovereignty.
Add to the stack of circumstances, the self-claimed Guild-master was dead within an hour of his arrival under Tatiseigi’s roof—it could be argued it had been about an hour short of their own intention to assassinate Tabini—a first strike against Ragi power, but the Atageini had been the site of the response, and they had had to make a fast decision.
As Murini had been prepared to make. His own shaken wits informed him that if Guild had come in to assassinate Tabini, it was not going to be the final blow, and it was not going to stop any time soon. There was much, much more intended.
Tatiseigi had had no choice but become involved—the epicenter of the event, exposed to any outrage, beginning with that Guild intrusion, and expanding to every alliance the old man had. The old man had seen it come over the horizon when the dowager had showed up at his gates. Murini had sent in the Kadagidi, Tabini had moved in immediately after with his counterrevolution, the Guild had come in next to take Tabini out in a finessed strike, one that would leave the dowager alive, for her unique value to national stability, and no one had ever seemed to care about Tatiseigi in the process—but only one outcome of this whole affair possibly led to Tatiseigi’s grand-nephew being in supreme power over the aishidi’tat, and he wasn’t letting events pass him by this time.
An entire lifetime of evading conflict until the dust was already settling, a lifetime of being moderately obstructionist to Tabini’s modernization policy, and suddenly Tatiseigi was taking his whole province to war behind Tabini-aiji to put him back in power.
He found his way back to his seat, Cajeiri meanwhile kneeling and talking volubly to his two young escorts, who held the seat behind. Cajeiri turned around as Bren eased past that obstruction and sat down in his own place next to the window.
“The other buses are supposed to keep this bus on the inside,”
Cajeiri informed him. “So snipers will have no targets. But we should keep our heads down if shooting starts, nand’ paidhi, Nawari said so, because it will be very heavy guns and they could blow this bus to bits.”
Cheerful lad. “Whose bus is this, does one have any notion?
“It belongs to Dur,” Cajeiri said, which was Rejiri’s clan. “The lord of Dur and his bodyguard and the fishers’ association, too, nandi! They came in from the train station while the young lord took the plane! —I know where Dur is,” he added, apropos of nothing about the bus itself. Ilisidi had kept him at his lessons during their flight, and he did know his provinces. “Dur helped mani-ma in previous times.”
“That they did, young sir,” Bren murmured. He had an inner vision of a nightbound coast with fire and smoke on every hand, and an improbable ferryboat plowing in toward the beach at the most critical of moments. ”And so they help her again, for which we all shall remember them with great favor.”